Peter Lanborn Wilson on RAW

"Bob was a Futurist and I am a Luddite, but after a long series of letters back and forth we agreed to disagree on the subject of technology, since neither of us wanted to put ideology in the place of camaraderie."

RAW's "futurist," optimistic take on the Internet meshes nicely with the outlook of Mike Masnick; see the interview I referenced here.

9 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It might be worth correcting the typo in the title. I imagine P.L.W. would be horrified to be Local-Area-Network-born! That dubious honour is reserved for those of us in the Internets, for good or ill.

I hadn't read the obituary before. Also, thank you very much indeed for the link to his poetry readings - great material.

It's good to know what he's been up to recently. I'd recommend Pirate Utopias highly, though sadly some of his works seem quite hard to find.

I found his work not long after stumbling upon Robert Anton Wilson, and like RAW, was instantly transfixed. In the same way RAW turned me onto Leary, John C. Lilly and science fiction , P.L.W turned me onto poetry, Bill Laswell, Burroughs, Christopher Hill etc.

Both have enlightened this poor commentator with new and incredible ways of perceiving the world.

If anyone is interested, archive.org has quite a selection of good P.L.W material, such as tape recordings of talks he gave at Naropa and so on.

It's obtuse, but I guess the style and content is firmly in the tradition of baudraillard's hyper-realist view. There is a lot to be worked out, but bassically he is saying that monetary speculation is not real but it is replacing the real in our considerations. He is against "spooks" and the sublimating of them into gods.

In baudrillards view of the world, the map becomes the territory or indistinguishable from it the more we are immersed in those maps. Hakim is saying that this is happening with (speculative) capital. On that note, watch cosmopolis (pretentious nonsense, at times, but it captures the problem quite well)

following on the comments from dirtydiscordia, I thought some ppl may like to know that I uploaded some of the best shows from PLW's late-night radio show, The Moorish Orthydox Radio Crusade, on archive.org not too long ago: https://archive.org/details/GemsMoorishOrthodoxRadioCrusade

There is less PLW on these later episodes, but still enjoyable to listen to: https://archive.org/details/MORCFarewell

At the risk of over-exposure, I could also direct your attention to some academic work out I have published on PLW: https://www.academia.edu/9121109/Hakim_Bey_Chapter_43_The_Occult_World_

Lastly, here is an article on PLW, chaos magick, and anarchism. It mentions Discordinanism briefly too:https://www.academia.edu/3450874/_Occult_Origins_Hakim_Bey_s_Ontological_Anarchism_in_Anarchist_Developments_in_Cultural_Studies_issue_2013.2

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A daily posting from Tom Jackson about my favorite writer, Robert Anton Wilson. I also seek material by or about Robert Shea, Mr. Wilson's collaborator in writing "Illuminatus!" If you have tips, you may write me at tom.jackson@gmail.com. Please put "Robert Anton Wilson" in the subject line.